Quote Originally Posted by ftafp View Post
Yes and no. A lot of it depends on what the DM will allow and what the player knows how to do, but generally ranger's favored due to its spell list and access to the archery fighting style. In particular, Pass Without Trace, Conjure Animals, Plant Growth and Conjure Woodland Beings are some of the best spells at their levels, and being long-duration spells they're well suited to half-casters who are working with limited spell slots. Artificer in contrast gets some good ones like Shield, Web, Fireball and Tiny Servants, but due to limited slots Web is the only one they're going to get a significant amount of use out of. Compounding this, artificers other than the battle smith fall behind in damage due to their reliance on cantrips (or in armorer's case, bad weapons), and in the battle smith's case there's still a gap. Archery offers twice the bonus to attack rolls that a repeating weapon does, and unlike repeating weapon it will stack with any magical weapons the ranger picks up along the way. The simple fact is, artificer falls behind in damage and control hard without resorting to cheesy tricks, and this is all before you factor in ranger's subclass features, particularly those of Gloomstalker.
What's stopping any artificer who want to deal damage to grab Archer with a feat? They are much SaD by in nature than rangers and will have the space to spare. Even then the damage gap you are talking about is like 4% even if you give them both a magical weapon which doesn't weaken infusions because that's a deep list to features to shift that resource around in.